


worlds without end

by macha



Series: Georgia on My Mind [18]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-01-17
Updated: 2007-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:49:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macha/pseuds/macha





	worlds without end

###  _A03.14.03 AdAstra Era: in the matrix, we are home._

and the name of the tale is:

### worlds without end

When I come in to check out all the commotion, make sure that no one's snuck downstairs without me to open stockings, I find them somehow all three thoroughly entwined and having a moment. And when they disentangle, and I get to enjoy the spectacle of my older sister, who used to seem so far away, laughing and crying at the same time, as though it was the silly season, then I finally get to meet the dragon face to face in a way I never thought I could. And I get nuzzled, first thing, which is a curious sensation. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me? Always about the blood, Spike used to say, and maybe he was right.

Then I can show off my newfound fluency, brought to her courtesy of Spike's very odd idea of lessons, in the Common tongue. I'm not quite getting right yet the exact inflection for the word 'friend'; there's a whole extra shape to that that's still beyond my ken. The house is so still around me that in the nursery I can hear one of the babies calling, and Tara going in to pick her up. Now there are stirrings. In a few minutes it will be pandemonium everywhere. What kind, I wonder.

And then, because I'm dying to try out a formal welcome phrase in the old High language, that I got out of a book (just winging it on pronunciation there) I wait till they pay attention, and bow gravely, presenting myself, as Key, to the Chancellor of the Summer Lands, and welcoming her formally to the stronghold of the House of Summers. Which is a little bit a tease, because of course she's welcome: after all, it's Georgia who makes the not necessarily magic that rebuilds it out of air and pixie dust or something like, every time we move these days. She even oversees the setting of the wards, with Willow, on every door, that only I can override.

Still, there's a certain cachet to having a Georgia wrapped around your house in times of trouble. Georgia inclines her head with dignity, and welcomes me in turn to the matrix of her own associations. I note the phrasing carefully, for later on, when all of them come forward to be called. My sense of the unreal is working overtime. What the eye can plainly see isn't necessarily what the brain can comprehend.

It sounds completely medieval, doesn't it? Dawn in a world of legend. Though in that case wardrobe should have provided something a bit more suitable than this baseball shirt, like maybe the dress I had to wear the night I was meant to die at the top of that rickety tower. There was a dragon then too, in the sky. That's when they first came through. Because I am the Key. It was my blood that opened the gate. And Buffy closed it with her own, too late. Stupid sister, always running late.

But down the hall, in the house that's rather bigger than it used to be, I can still hear the little sounds that the lab makes, experiments that Willow and Illyria have running, that someday will build things (or sometimes bring them down): burbling of beakers, tiny timer sounds. Science and dragons, such unmixy things in the medieval, working together. Did Glory ever imagine this result the night she used my blood to open all the doors between dimensions?

Now I have been claimed, by an elder dragon. I look right into Georgia's golden eyes, and down a thousand generations across time. And find myself mirrored there, in the dragon's eye, in another language altogether that I'm not at all certain I am truly good enough to learn. But long ago I wondered if I was real at all. Now I can walk through the walls between dimensions. I can step in and out of time, which runs in all directions. And I do know that I am real, in spite of all of that.

I run downstairs, still barefoot, to set off the alarm. I'm not the sacrifice, not any more. Some creatures stirring now behind every door I pass. There goes the gift exchange that everybody planned so long for. It doesn't matter. These kids are so young now that they're unlikely to remember the whole thing. Willing to bet they will remember Georgia, though, after today. The hall's much bigger than it was last night.

We can do it now in five minutes flat, an evacuation. Hard to imagine, given the kids, but we've all practiced it until it's second nature. The laundry bags are ready for the gear we might need on the fly, and everything else gets stowed, like on a ship. It is a ship, though mostly in disguise, so we can call it home. Then we strap in, cocooning, into somewhere else. There are still tears rolling down my sister's face; she always takes it hard when we have to let one go. It was a lost cause, really, by the time we got here, this time, but she looks at every world as hers to lose. The house counts down to jump, and I say the name of everyone I knew here and could not keep. I'm not the only one who does it either. It's in the counting up of the human cost of war that we know ourselves.

On the other side, the bells ring and the ship sets down. It carries its own ground, which is the meadow from the home world that filled the crater where Sunnydale used to be. The only ground that we can ever really hold. Because it's incorruptible. That's what he made, the day he sealed the Hellmouth long ago. Georgia once called it a reconsecrated ground. Sacred to what? I thought to tease Spike later. He looked through me and into somewhere else awhile before he answered. Evil can't grow there, he said, like as if that was a simple matter. Can it still grow in you? I wondered. No, was all he said.

While others are making sure everyone's okay I go running again to open up the main doors of this shipworld. I always get to be first to breathe the atmosphere. Georgia is already waiting there. She never travels in the ship, but out in the cold of space. She likes to slide down wyrmholes, and talk to stars; also like Spike she doesn't need to breathe. I never did get time to put my shoes on this morning, and the grass of the meadow that fills the main cargo bay is green and cool beneath my feet. It still seems big to me, till Georgia's there. She built the house around us, out of Buffy's memories of home. Revello Drive keeps getting bigger. And so do we, with kids to raise, Slayers to train, science to master, and worlds to save. We leave a little of ourselves behind wherever we go. We bring with us a set of tools, a center of learning, life sciences and poetry and military tactics and agriculture. We bring them choices; it's our version of planetforming, in a way. We try to leave them all with more than a foothold: Slayers and communications towers, magic and science. And seed, more than one kind.

Formally, in the Great Hall, we start the ceremony called rededication. We do it every time we move, so we remember. So we can choose again, if it's too hard, but so far nobody has ever undeclared. Spike does the formal Common words of greeting that welcome Georgia to the hall. I do the English translation, but soon I'll be fluent enough in High to add that in. Georgia is pretty pleased that I can say her formal name, which has so many syllables and timbres that it took me a very long time to get right. Everyone stands there ready; and even the kids don't cry. Buffy and Spike come down to the front of the hall. Georgia puts one paw down, open, and turns it over and then they climb aboard, and she lifts them up so they can, sort of, look each other in the eye. It sounds kinda funny, but it somehow never is. She does it because she wants to be sure that everyone understands that this is a pact the three of them made together, as equals, long ago.

This is how it began, the story goes. It's written like a shadow play. But really, it is written in the stars. Spike looks at Georgia with those clear blue eyes.

"First", he says, "there were dragons. So there are three."

"You have been called", he says to Georgia. "I called you. And you came."

"You have been claimed. I claim you for the light."

That's Georgia's cue. "Illyria", says Georgia, in translation anyway. She has a True Name, same as Georgia, and it shakes the hall. Illyria crosses the floor to stand with them. Not as a dragon, though that's what she is. Moves like a dragon, though; and most of us have seen her turn in combat. Buffy says she told Georgia once that Illyria was scarier than her, and Georgia rolled her eyes and said that Illyria was still very young. It's hard to know exactly what this ceremony means to her, when she's not being Fred, but something, cause when it's over she's as close as she ever gets to humble. Okay, that's not very close, but it's amazing just the same.

"You have been called", Georgia says to her, gravely. "I called you. And you came." We've never quite known why. It probably was what Fred would have wanted, but what Illyria might want is kind of a mystery. She's called Spike comrade since that day that they first stood together in battle, and he's good enough at what he does to give her decent sparring practice, and more good advice than she thinks is good for her, but I still suspect her way of claiming him, left to her own devices, wouldn't be much like this.

It's certainly not just Fred who works with Willow in the lab, because I doubt that Fred ever learned the language of the green, since I can't make any headway with it either. Although Illyria claims it's because I can't slow time down, I can just walk through it, and she says that like it's a parlor trick that's only fit to amuse the children. But still for reasons she doesn't understand herself she can't seem to rid herself of that merely human urge to make connections, and even to feel and sometimes show that those feelings she cherishes and views as alien mean something that's worth keeping in whatever it is she uses for a heart. "You have been claimed." And so she lets Spike reassure her sometimes, both that it matters and that it doesn't necessarily make her human. "I claim you for the light." This is her empire now, and she's determined that this one will not come to dust.

Next comes the part that Buffy hates to do. Worse every time. "Angel", she always says, and he does not come. He's never come. I asked her why she didn't just stop calling him. She says that there must be three, and she will not choose to call another. And Georgia promised her that someday he would come.

"You have been called", she says it anyway. "I called you." Then she stops and waits. As if he might. Till finally, she says it, "And you have not come." Willow says that there is so much power in all these words that seem so simple, that we have no words for it, though dragons do. She says that it calls to whoever it names across both space and time, and if you bend to it, then it will bring you here. Angel was never very good at bending.

Spike holds my sister's hand. I don't want to look at him now, because sometimes he looks more vulnerable than he likes to. He thinks it's all his fault; I talked to him about it once, but now we both pretend we didn't. "You have been claimed", my sister says, fierce as she's ever been in battle. Her voice, though, doesn't even wobble any more as she finishes, "I claim you for the light."

It's Georgia's turn. "Then", she says, "There were Slayers. So there are three." And she calls Buffy, of course, who is hers anyway, as surely as it's true the other way around. We never knew, though, that the Slayer line was quite as old as that, until she came. And Georgia tells that story to the children sometimes. She never tells it quite the same way, and I have to translate for her, but when she starts everyone tends to drift back into the hall to hear it again, and see for themselves what almost no one on any world has ever seen, a very large dragon curled up on our familiar meadow ground, with all the children nestling into her belly where it's so soft and warm. Spike told her once she ought to have been a poet, and she said what makes you think I'm not, and I think he's still trying to figure that one out.

"You have been called", she tells my sister, and green looks into golden eyes. "I called you. And you came." And then she takes the smooth backside of one of her claws and she very carefully runs it along one cheek and through Buffy's hair. It's a caress. "You have been claimed", she says. "I claim you for the light."

Now Buffy calls out "Faith", and Faith is there. There was one time they called her when she was Out and she didn't answer them. And Buffy and Spike both left the hall on the run and went to find her downworld, and brought her home, and then she screamed and howled for days while they stayed with her, and then they all went down to the hall together and said all the words again, and then Faith answered, her voice so hoarse from weeping she almost couldn't be understood. And I never knew what happened, but after that it was a long time before she ever left the house. Even now she works mostly with the children here and only goes out to fight.

"You have been called", Buffy tells her. "I called you, and you came. You have been claimed. I claim you for the light." And in the light of several moons Faith's face is shining. She told me once, though Buffy never would, they still share Slayer dreams. Once very long ago they were the Chosen Two, though that went badly, and I think they both regret those years they wasted trying to pull back from that intensity they shared but never asked for.

Spike's turn to call. They each chose one to claim. "Dana", he says, and Dana's there. There was an uproar when he did it first, I remember that. So many Slayers to choose from, and he picked the one who was mad, her mind in so many pieces no one could figure out how to put her back together. Or whether it was kind to even try. Spike only said, "I have that right." He went to find her, long ago, to fight, before Earth's final battle, offering her a bit of glory at what we all believed would be the end of everything. not a good time for her, because the dreams she had were real, but she couldn't know that where she was, locked up and unable to sort out all the voices in her head. But when he came she knew him, which must have been scary for him in itself. And I wonder if she thought he'd come to kill her, when she looked at him and let him take her hand like a child, but anyway she came, and fought on that last day beside him.

"You have been called. I called you." For years she chained herself up when she went to bed, like I remember long ago he used to do before he could trust himself, but all that time he went down to talk to her every night, to remind her that she had the only key, and where she kept it. He doesn't have to do that any more. "You have been claimed", he tells her tenderly, touching her face. "I claim you for the light." The ceremony goes on, but I'm still watching Dana looking at Spike as though in him she saw that light, even though she wasn't there on that earlier morning when we shut the Sunnydale Hellmouth down.

Then there are witches. Georgia calls Willow, of course. She knew about Willow before she ever met Spike, although they hadn't met: she says that that much power tends to make the universe leap to attention. I can't tell yet if that's a joke; and I'm not sure anyway what it would look like to see a dragon laughing. Though Buffy says she snorts, and rolls her eyes, and does this kind of fake droopy look when she's amused. "You're such a drama queen", Spike tells her then, and in response she makes a bubbling sound, and maybe that's a giggle, if you're a dragon, which is pretty funny in itself if you think about it.

Buffy calls Tara. Anyone you call, Georgia told her, can come if they choose. And doesn't that sound simple, till you think about it. Tara is just the same, quiet and loving and patient with everyone. Serene. She keeps Willow grounded. She runs the whole household. She'll even still make me heart-shaped pancakes, and curl up with me to watch bad movies. Her magic is all domestic; she speaks the language of small things in balance with the world. There is nothing hurtful in it, or anywhere in her. She never talks about what balance, or what peace, she may have given up the day that she accepted Buffy's call. But she is needed here, and greatly loved. And she is probably the strongest of us all.

And Spike calls Andrew. I can remember when we laughed at Andrew. When he was bad, and Willow brought him home. I really wonder sometimes just what Spike was like when he was William. Before he was turned. He never talks about it, except to say his poetry these days isn't entirely bad. And once he said his mother loved him. So he was not entirely alone. And maybe Andrew survived when all the odds were against him and the First set out to turn him, just because Buffy and Spike and Anya, for a few fleeting moments, took the time to be gratuitously kind. Because when they did for the first time Andrew chose to believe that he was cared for, and so he cared for them because he was not alone.

But Andrew doesn't call himself a wizard. He says that magic is just a logic system, built out of science and wielded with all the power that resides inside the knowledge. And there I understand him perfectly, because it is really the same with words. No matter how simple they seem to be, they carry the power inside them to destroy us, and to make us whole. And indeed the naming of things itself is a kind of magic. Which is why dragons are always reluctant to say their own names, lest they be used against them. Which tells you something, about what it means that here in the ceremony Georgia and Illyria both reveal to all of us their names.

So Willow and Andrew have both been to places with that power that were made out of pure destruction, and now they both know exactly what they're capable of, and why it matters not to go there again. It's in their eyes sometimes, that darkness, like it's in Faith and Dana's too. I don't know exactly why, but it's never in my sister's any more.

"Last", Spike says so quietly, "there were angels. So there are three." This is the part that was the hardest to know, and to learn to deal. For all of us, and perhaps especially for him, though he never says. Because it wasn't the way we knew them, on the world we came from. It wasn't the way they knew themselves. Now we have been to many worlds on which it was otherwise, and so we know why they are here. But the first time we did the ceremony of dedication, the whole alliance, what Georgia calls the matrix of her associations when she uses those formal words, almost came apart. Except that we already knew that Spike, when Buffy finally came home with him and brought Georgia here, had no evil in him. Because we had already seen him close the Hellmouth, full of light.

Georgia begins. "Darla", she says, and Darla comes. Mostly she lives in her tower, among a great many beautiful things. I have been there myself more than once, because of Connor, and it always feels like magic, the kind of alchemy that happens when true and true meet one another. Spike asked Georgia if she would make that tower for her, when Darla first came, but all he said was that Darla had always loved a view. And we thought he must be joking, because everyone knew that vampires liked to live in the dark of the downBelow. But Georgia only said, she needs an eyrie, and she made it so.

"You have been called", Georgia says to her, in the speech of equals. Darla is as fluent as I am, though her vocal range is not the same. I've heard the stories, though I don't remember her, from when we first went to live in Sunnydale, though my mother told me about the time she met her once, as though it was just a story. "I called you. And you came." Even Spike thought she maybe wouldn't. And he had no idea who she'd come to be. Somewhere along the line, he learned to trust himself, and that heart that's still the only thing he owns that could ever break.

So hers is the western tower, Illyria's is in the east. They visit one another often, over the rooftops, even though Darla cannot share her own True Name, because it was lost to her so long ago. And nobody knows what they have to talk about when they're having tea, though they'd certainly like to. But Darla has been places that even Illyria never thought to go, and done things even a god-king can only imagine. Whatever she is today, it is clearly the end result of love, and Illyria, I think, is always wondering how to get to that, because she loves the webs that do not unravel.

"You have been claimed." What does it mean to be immortal? I don't think anyone really knows, except for Georgia who sometimes seems so young, and Darla who is very beautiful but always seems to live outside of time, and Illyria who owned time once and has not forgotten. Whatever age means to them, they are never toothless; I have seen them turn and rear in battle, and they fight with an abandon that hardly seems prudent. And if you were evil you wouldn't want to get between any of them and any child at all. Their thinking is all so longview, it's hard for us sometimes to grasp why they would bother with us here. But "every child is a world that we can save", I heard Darla say once in Council, and it stuck because all the time I keep returning to it myself as I begin to understand what we can do by simply being here. "I claim you", equal to equal, dragon to angel, "for the light." It's just in the eyes that I can tell how old they really are; it is a language of experience that I will never be able to catch up to. Perhaps what they know can be spoken only to one another.

And it's Spike's turn. Boy, did it get him in hot water at the time, with everyone. But all he said was the same thing he said about Dana, "I have the right." The only reason he got away with it at all was that nobody ever thought she'd really come. "Drusilla", he says, all formal. "I called you." And she comes drifting down the length of the hall. She never looks as though her feet quite touch the ground. Perhaps they don't. She's very calm, as long as she knows he's there. "And you came." He takes her hand, and kisses it. He even looks properly grateful for her favor. She was his sire; he was her perfect knight. She's pretty medieval; maybe that's the kindest world she could imagine herself back into.

"You have been claimed." It's probably not the world she wanted. She lives mostly in the tower, with Darla who is both her grandsire and her child. And it's complicated. Like Dana, she has plenty of power, but under that she's fragile. Since both of them were deliberately, thoroughly broken. There are still chains, on the wall in the tower, and sometimes Darla calls for Spike, and then he always drops everything and goes. "But here there is time", Spike said, that time in Council when he argued it. She's amazingly good, on some of the worlds, as an emissary. There's so much in her head, but she still always cuts to the heart of the matter. She knows, I think, not too little but rather too much.

Mad but not foolish, Drusilla has paid a price too high for what she knows. And she is innocent, Spike told me once, beneath it all. And right there that is so much Dana too, and that much we can all learn over time to understand. "I claim you", he tells her gently, looking bravely into her eyes, "for the light."

And then it's Buffy who says the third name, "Connor". Though it was only after Darla came that we knew his parentage for sure; Illyria never said and neither did he. When he comes down the hall he looks so young; none of his pain shows in his face. We still don't know exactly how it was that he was made. Why is another question that remains unanswered. And these are only some of the burdens he has to carry.

"You have been called", she says to him. "I called you. And you came." Prophecy is not something that we live by, as a general rule. Buffy, she stood outside it, and made it bend to her. And Spike went out of his way to circumvent it. But it is otherwise for Connor, maybe because there was simply so much prophecy around his father. Maybe because, just like his father, there are two of him. But over him always there is the weight of the prophecy that cannot be mended or undone, because of the way that Sahjhan meddled with it before Connor killed him. It's only half fulfilled, you see; the father has killed the son, but the son has not yet killed his father.

"You have been claimed", she says. And every time at this point Spike cuts in to say "you are my brother", as if it was part of the covenant. Perhaps it is. Since after all, Angel the hollow man has made two sons, impossibly, and both of them are true, to light and to one another. It is a legacy worth holding onto, even from where he stands now in the dark. And so Connor always knows that she means it with her whole heart every time she says "I claim you for the light." For she will never let go of the best of either one, of Connor and his father too. As Buffy was never any good at taking back again anything that she had freely given: one thing about my sister, she always and forever plays for keeps.

"Once", Georgia says, looking at Spike, "there was everywhere, in all these worlds without end, a darkness".

Drusilla's eyes are bright, and she is smiling when she asserts her claim: "I read the stars", she tells him, "and I chose you, and you came. My comet fell to earth, and there I loved you, and thrice set you free."

"I watched you change", my sister says, "until there was no darkness in you but my own, and then I set you free."

"I have been called", he says to both of them. "You called me, and I came. To give myself, in love", he tells them, "becoming what you needed, first I lost myself, and was remade, in blood, in earth, in water, and twice finally in fire. And now I own myself. But love was always the only gift I had to bring. I have been claimed, twice loved, twice Chosen, by the Dark One and the Bright. And now I claim myself, giving myself by choice forever into light. "

Then Buffy always reaches out her hand, and lays it on his heart. He puts his own hand over hers, enacting their own ceremony of rededication every time within the larger one. "This is the shape of love, as much as we can name", she says to him, he says to her, before us. "I will not let you fall, I will not leave you, though every world may end. No harm will come to all we love and still can save while we remain. Until there may come an end to time, and even then we will go out together."

So of them all it's Angel who is the thirteenth one, the prodigal. The Chosen One who chooses not to come. He is not here, but still his shadow is. It is on Buffy's face, and Spike's, every time they call. It is on all the worlds we see, that are dead and broken. Still Georgia says that he will come, and so does Dru. Perhaps Dru knows his end, and ours, and the death of the universe besides, but all of that she does not say. Spike says that in that way at least, she is still kind. All she reports is that "though he never will be Master here, still he will come".

But that's ambiguous, isn't it? About which one will come, and for what purpose. Yet Spike and Buffy both know that, better than anyone, and still they call. What does Dru see exactly, in the stars that change so utterly now in the sky, that tells her to expect her father and destroyer? What does she want from him, in grace, in divination, on the day he comes? How can we ever know, those things Dru knows, and still be sane?

"Always", Georgia says, "there was The Key. There is no other."

"You have been called", she says to me. "We called you. And you came."

"You have been claimed. We claim you for the light."

So we go out, seed and reseed whole worlds and times and space with our gifts of knowledge, children, ways of seeing. Seeding the cold stars, into galaxies that where we came from had no names. Gifting the quickening of life that we can cherish just because it is so brief. Out past the speed of light, past the ends of time, which runs in all directions. We raise them, and we love them, and we let them go. To live unbound, in space and time, as we are bound without them. To know today, and still be spared eternity. We cannot spare ourselves, unless we choose to call an end to everything.

How can we understand what it is like to be immortal? Though we may die in battle we have been called, and we have chosen and been chosen, and it is curse and blessing, and it has made the worlds we know and cannot truly keep. I know my sister once would have preferred to die in order to be free. The woods are dark, but we have promises to keep. He promised her, before she jumped, with dragons in the sky, that he would keep me safe until the end of the world. Down all the generations, till we finally run out of stars to stand on, life is a gift. And all of us, alive, unliving, fight every day, in labs and libraries, in nurseries and scrying-bowls and schoolrooms, and on the battlegrounds of worlds we once could not imagine. So we are every one of us here dedicated to honor life and to give it back.

This is a war; we can't win every battle. When Georgia came this morning, we had lost it there. This world outside the cargo hold is also real, though it can never be the one we started out in. The sun is different, and the gravity, and the alignment of the stars. Spike's constancy is real; and so is the tenacity that is my sister. Which only goes to show, as our mother used to say, that you really can take it with you. We carry what she gave us wherever we go. There stands against the dark one house we call Revello Drive, built on the Sunnydale Meadow That Withstands Corruption; we bring it with us every time shipworld sets down and roots itself in the worlds we travel. The ship's already only a legend in so many of the worlds and timelines where we've walked. But for all those who have been called and came to live inside it, here we are bound, improbably, by love, and so we call it home.


End file.
